performance - Using Rack servers and Blade servers in the same lab?

I'm working on pulling together a comprehensive performance testing lab. Part of this is the question of the physical lab hardware, so I'm learning about rack and blade servers and the positives and negatives of each.

To give a little background, it's a performance testing lab for database applications, so there are going to be around 8-10 machines in each lab rig. This includes things like a monitoring server to collect data during test runs, web servers, database server, and all the pieces needed to actually generate the load.

Because of the specifics of the company, we have the opportunity to re-purpose existing blade servers (Dell M610s) to fill some of these roles. Namely, the web servers and data collection machines.

What I'm unsure of is if there are any problems for using a mixture of rack servers and blade servers in the same lab (not in the same chassis/rackspace). Due to the requirements of our database servers (mainly the need for local attached storage) we are going to use rack servers for those.

Answer

No, there's no problems at all - so long as you're within your power and cooling budgets - and you're no more likely to encounter a network problem dealing with both blades and rack-mounters than if they were all one type or the other.

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